Jennifer Fossenbell :: Three poems

NEW BODY OF WORK

I dreamed all night in theory and woke up feeling
problematized.

I had a dream in my semiotic paradigm and got up on
the ossified side of the bedand hungry for cereal. My biological project makes
demands.You could say I’m super productive these days, I
never stop getting larger.I am a very interesting ride. There is plenty of excitement here! I misread my name as a common noun, some kind of
produce.If I had some oranges they would turn me into salt.Today is a lighthorse day, a good day to do yogurt
and levitate.I remember when I was always already hungry and
rejected the praxis of consumption.When I was hungry my appetite was precluded by the
hegemony of the pirated body.The truth is I never bleed anymore but I seep uncontainable
doctrines in every direction.Maria D. is at her spinning wheel. She has broken
the code and will teach me to build sound in this way.She and we are knitting the airwaves.Cell by cell, she is making an ark/a hive, and I
will put in a hand, draw out a hand.Alan S. says this harmonica plays only one lingua. We are tying knots of our mothers’ blood and we are
knitting them together. By repeating we are knotting.Our language is free of all associations. My letters are lying around on their backs, kicking.Trying to escape this somatic entrenchment.We like to hang things on the walls to keep them
from falling.Today is language in free-fall, today is a utopian
rejection of futurity.Do you know how hard I’m trying to reach you?I wish for everything to smell like oranges.This is my silent phase, the light outlining the
door. Today is sudden.Always I am not trying hard enough.We are buzzing on the waves, knotting them together.Knowing something is plenty, a row of nots, of Xs. My fetus kicks out, dreams of ejecting itself from
the margins. Always already hungry for a new body of text to rip
open, permeate, replace.

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MAN, IT'S ABOUT THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT
SURROUND THE MANMy fingers
smelled like curryas I watched
a one small mongrel humping another in a grove
of trees off Jingmi LuHer face
was surprisingly placid as she braced herself and
watched the traffic go byIn the
taxi, I placed my hands on my lap and felt my stillnessI placed
one hand over the other and that hand over my deviceI stroked
my device and thought about the devastation of nationsI thought
about that small dog's penis and questions of consentI thought
about the differences between the taxi driver and meI resisted
the urge to lift my fingers to my nosetake a whiff
of what I had for lunchI thought
about the phrase “a sense of propriety,” mine and his as he
glanced at me in the mirror I thought
about passivity, mine and the dog's, and I
thought about pride, mine and the nation'sI thought about what we mean when we say exoticMillions
of my own countrymen are exotic to me nowAnd
whether “exotic” or “erotic” are reciprocal relationshipsI looked
out the window into clusters of men inside the
groves of treesand
thought about what to do about the devastationhow to
gather myself into a small force and apply it somewhere usefulhow to
bloody and salve, how to lay down, how not to lie downhow to
resist the too-quick unburdeningIt has to
be personal I looked
at my screen and said it out loud:It has to be personal.The taxi
driver glanced up, jerked his chin to one sidewhen he
saw I wasn’t talking on the phone, embarrassed by my
exotic disclosureThis is just a start, I said to his eyes in the
rear-view mirror.ALL
MEN WILL BE SAILORS THEN, UNTIL THE SEA SHALL FREE THEMThe ship gallops across the winds and we ride her, dig in our heels and grip the lines.No one knows we’re out here in this storm.The skipper doesn’t speak our languageand we’re not sure we do, either. We drinkthrough our confusion and laugh with nervous teeth.After dark we enjoy the steady press of our berth at our backs, tell stories about geography and history and other motionless surfaces.We peer through the round eyes of our cabinsblinking iron lids of half-water, half-sky. The blackness is striped with lapping, eerie
tongues.The swells finally roll us to sleep below deck while the crew above shout to each other and dogeometry. From below, every word sounds a siren.In the morning we line our hands up with the flat horizon, say prayers to physics, to bodies at rest
that will stay that way. Beneath the hull, continents of
hungry fish rise.NOTE:
The title comes from the song “Suzanne” by Leonard CohenJennifer Fossenbell
currently lives in Beijing, where she works as a news editor. Her poems,
proses, visual-linguistic compositions, and translations have appeared in
exhibitions and publications in China, the U.S., and Vietnam: most recently in
'Bad Code' (a Beijing multimedia art exhibition), Posit, Spittoon Literary Journal, Small
Po[r]tions, AJAR, Yes Poetry, and Gigantic Sequins, and forthcoming in Black Warrior Review.

where is the river :: a poetry experiment is a
bi-monthly poetry journal open to a variety of aesthetics, forms and
experiences, with a preference towards showcasing work by emerging writers. There is no single
path, nor any single way. Founded in September 2017. Edited by Kiefer JD Logan.